By Culture News

We all deal with election-related stress in different ways. Some of us are scheduling calls with our therapists. Some of us are buying out shelves of Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food. Some of us have taped a bottle of Chateau Diana to our sweaty paws and started drinking ourselves into a stupor. And some of us — dare I say, the more psychologically well-adjusted among us? — are eroticizing Fivey, the vulpine mascot of Nate Silver’s wonk blog, FiveThirtyEight.

Here is what you need to know about Fivey: he officially debuted last summer as part of FiveThirtyEight’s 2020 election forecast rollout. He is a fox. He’s bookish and unassuming, more of a John Mulaney-type sex-symbol than a Pete Davidson, and he wears Buddy Holly-esque Coke-bottle spectacles, presumably as an aesthetic choice meant to connote wonkishness rather than for actual pragmatic reasons (foxes have notoriously good eyesight).

The most important thing you need to know about Fivey, however, is that he is unspeakably hot, at least if the replies to his Twitter account (where he has amassed a little more than 7,000 followers) are any indication. On social media, he has amassed something of a following within the furry fandom, a community made up of people with an affinity for anthropomorphized animals. It’s worth noting that contrary to most media coverage, not everyone in the community is actually sexually attracted to cartoon mammals; yet the reaction to Fivey specifically is not unlike that of Tony the Tiger, another beloved russet-hued mammal who warranted a great deal of X-rated thirst within a certain segment of the furry community. “You come back out of that hole, you cutie! WE WANT MORE FIVEY!” says one reply to Fivey’s entreaty to vote; another less delicately requests “pics of [his] foxhole.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is also a growing library of Fivey porn. An (obviously NSFW) cartoon of an erect Fivey, with the caption “I’m horny for statistics! Wanna see the results of my poll?” got a few hundred retweets shortly after Fivey’s debut last August.


“There’s something of a tradition for furries online to be very open about their crushes on corporate mascots…and this extends to making erotic fan art,” says @CritterDome, the NSFW artist behind the drawing. “I personally prefer drawing more obscure or overlooked characters, so as soon as FiveThirtyEight introduced Fivey Fox back in August, I hurriedly started drawing the way other furry artists might after Nintendo unveils a new Pokemon.”

On the subreddit r/ImSorryNate, a consortium of Fivey-centric memes, there is Fivey diaper porn as well as Fivey vore, a fetish that involves the eroticization of giants consuming people (in this case, Fivey is depicted eating ballots). There is also a subreddit devoted to Fivey porn, r/fivethirtyfour, though as of press time it only has about four members.

To an extent, the eroticization of Fivey was something of an inevitability. Rule 34 of the internet dictates that if something exists, porn will be made of it; this is particularly true in the furry community, the progenitor of much of the extant Fivey porn. (It’s also worth noting, as Rolling Stone reported from the furry con MidWest FurFest in 2019, foxes are a common selection for fursonas, a term for furries’ fluffy or feathered alter egos).

Of course, this all begs the question: Is the eroticization of Fivey in earnest, or is it simply an ironic outgrowth of our collective election anxieties? The answer, says Ana Valens, a furry and fandom reporter for the website the Daily Dot, is both. “The furry fandom, like the anime fandom, loves to take organizations’ mascots and give them narratives that go way beyond the scope of the original companies’ marketing goals,” she tells Rolling Stone, citing the (NSFW) adultification of the Wendy’s logo as an example. @CritterDome confirms he has genuine affection for Fivey: “I’d say Fivey hits my ‘cute tiny nerd’ buttons pretty well, plus foxes are always furry bait,” he says.

It helps that FiveThirtyEight has long been a prime target for leftists’ mockery in the lead up to the election. Indeed, much of the NSFW Fivey commentary is accompanied by general ridicule of Silver and the website and its prioritization of polling data at the expense of everything else, even after the criticism following its forecast of the 2016 election. But vulgar satire doesn’t fully explain Fivey horniness. “It’s not all irony,” says Valens. “I mean, look at that fox, for Christ sake. He’s adorable. Whoever designed him definitely made a great mascot. But they also did something else: they created a character that innately appeals to anthropomorphic fans into nerdy vulpines.”